Languor
by percychased
Summary: Together, they would find a little bit of warmth from the cold of the past. Post-war friendship.


_Languor_

* * *

_November 2nd, 1998_

Through the windy, miserable, snowy conditions of northern Scotland, a young girl stood in her own world of idyllic peacefulness. The snow was falling all around her, just brushing her eyelashes and settling on her light hair.

The girl was thinking. That was all she had been doing lately, really; thinking. For six months. The battle had been won for six months, but was the war ever really going to be over? There is a war in her mind, a siege of thoughts and wishes and dreams.

There is beauty in creation, she is thinking, as the snow falls around her. Creation is the beauty of freedom. But freedom leads to destruction, too, and she doesn't know _where _she's going with these thoughts.

She felt like an aeroplane, then, is that what the Muggles call them? Always on a flight, always trying to go somewhere but ending up back home, to nowhere.

She's going nowhere, always has been, and the pub is nowhere tonight.

.::.

There was a boy, leaning against the wall outside the pub with his eyes closed. He was nineteen today. He played with the watch around his wrist that was exactly two years old, feeling the cold of the metal bite his fingertips and chill his bones.

His dad doesn't care and his mum would, if she could remember. She doesn't remember anything, though, not even the name of her only son.

_Anthony. _He remembered how his name used to sound in her mouth; like she was singing an old, beautiful song that she loved. It used to lull him to sleep, even as a teenager cooped up in the dormitories; he would think of her and her smile and her voice and sometimes, he had wished he was back home. He was almost a grown man back then, and he wished for his mother.

He's startled from his thoughts from the footsteps of a young, light-haired girl entering the pub, but he looked back down after the door clattered closed and returned to a world that was much, much happier than his own.

.::.

_February 14th, 1999_

The young girl wondered why they can all look so happy. She doesn't begrudge them, though; the willowy woman with a newborn infant, the young couple lost in a world that is theirs and theirs only walking in Hogsmeade.

She is wondering why they look so happy. Can they feel the grief in their bones like she does? Does it wither, crack, split with every step they take? The blood that is new and fresh in her veins feels like poison. Her heartbeat that sends it flowing through her body is a dull stab in her chest, just a little off to the right.

She hates today. Not the people, just the day. Maybe it was because she is bitter and lonely and goes home to an empty flat every night, but she _hateshateshates_ today.

She was kicking the snow outside in reverence when a dark-haired man ran into her. She looked up and scowled at him, displeased. There was a vague sense of familiarity around him, but she wasn't able pinpoint it, so she ignored it.

Until he said her name. He must have remembered her; how, she had no clue. She didn't - doesn't - believe she's anything remarkable, really.

"Demelza Robins?" he asked.

.::.

He was pretty sure he was a genius of sadness. He was a Ravenclaw – he had the appreciation, the driving ambition to learn more and to know more. To delve deeper, look harder, find more. The love for knowledge has always been inside of him; more recently, it has been lying dormant, but it was there, once, in a blur of words and pictures.

Sadness was a subject he was educated on. He had picked apart the threads, immersed himself in it, appreciated it. The facts and the figures, the beauty of it.

"You've got a bad habit, brooding," his mother would have said, patting him on the head and pulling cookies out of the oven.

He sighed. His feet were cold, but cold outside was better than going back to the flat he shared with Terry and Michael, them and their girlfriends, who always happened to be over. He held nothing against them, but he just... wanted time alone. Time to think.

He was almost to the pub, again, when he ran in to a girl violently kicking snow. He hadn't seen her until the last moment. She looked up and scowled at him.

He'd always been good with names. Memory certainly wasn't knowledge, but...

"Demelza Robins?"

.::.

_March 2nd, 1999_

They say you lose someone not all at once, but over time. Over time, she'll forget what her sisters' laugh sounded like when she got home, the smell of her watered-down, flowery perfume, or the feeling of her fingers winding through her hair.

Grief felt so much like fear. Merlin, did it ever.

It had been less than a year, and the feeling of her sister and her soft hair, her eyes like the ocean – powerful, beautiful, _blue_ – it was all slipping, slowly but surely. The words are being erased from the book, and she wished her sister would've dodged that curse, wouldn't have left her behind.

The girl sat waiting for the boy, running her fingers over the scars in the wood. The first time he spoke to her, with her feet covered in snow and his face turning blue from the cold, he said her name differently than she'd ever heard it before. She'd always been a part of a list – a team, a class, a group of friends. But he said it differently. Just her. Just _Demelza._

They had both went inside of the pub. The scent of alcohol was thick in the stuffy air, and they found a seat near the back. They both said nothing.

"Kicking the snow?" He had asked her, and she laughed.

It had felt good to laugh.

.::.

He met her there a quarter after one in the afternoon. He'd been apathetic that morning, that slow, lazy feeling in the pit of his stomach spreading all over his body, and all he wanted was to lie back and stare at the ceiling, to count the cracks and the ridges until he fell back asleep.

But he didn't, because he promised.

The girl who was vaguely familiar three weeks ago was a bit more familiar now. At first, they drank together in silence, and when she was tipsy and he was full-out drunk, they would stumble out together before going opposite ways.

They hadn't done that since last week. Sometimes, one of them would make an odd little comment. Yesterday, she had said only four words to him.

"It was my sister."

He had responded with another four.

"It was my mother."

The girl with the light hair and the thin face and big eyes was silent, but he was sure the war in her mind was as big as his.

.::.

_April 29th, 1999_

She met him almost every day now.

They talked more and more, and the feeling of rolling her thoughts into words was a sweet feeling she never could have imagined before. It was hard, almost _too _hard, but she didn't mind.

He spoke of the past a lot, of his childhood. Happy memories were abundant; he had a lot of them, before Hogwarts and before everything turned grey. She did, too.

He told her about the way his mother would read him Charles Dickens and Jane Austen for bedtime stories when he was a little boy, and how her voice had always been safety and home and love for him.

She told him about the bond between sisters, one he did not know about. Days in the summer, where they would argue about who got the loo first in the morning and _why didn't you wash the dishes? There's nothing left! _How they would laugh about it after and spend an afternoon braiding hair and swimming in the pond, how her sister would perfect her backstroke while she waded and relaxed.

It was almost as if she was using him for the past that had left her behind, and he her, but they both couldn't find it in them to turn away. Each day, every day, they would meet at the pub with red noses and cold hands, and somewhere, amidst the drinks and the shouting and the drunken laughter, they'd find a little bit of warmth.

* * *

a/n - For QL (go Puddles!) using flight, Valentine's Day, and snow, with the minor character Demelza Robins (54 fics) and Anthony Goldstein (109 fics). _Also _for As Strong as We Are United, team three. Review? Word count: 1,435.


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